Home Front

This 1944 article by the U.S. Commissioner of Education, John W. Studebaker (1887 – 1989), reported on the impact that W.W. II was having on the American educational system. Studebaker pointed out that during the course of the national emergency, as many as 115,000 teachers had left the nation's classrooms in order to help the war effort in one form or another:

"Every community can testify to the competent and unselfish job teachers have done both at their posts and in voluntary wartime tasks of rationing, salvaging and bond sales. But the fact remains that at this critical time in our history between 20,000 and 25,000 positions have been abandoned and thousands of classes are overcrowded. Look at these figures: in October, 1939, there were practically no teaching jobs vacant. In October, 1943 there were 7,700, and in addition , about 57,000 more positions had to be filled by teachers who could not meet the regular certification requirements."